El CID, Acorns are far more work to process than wheat. I took some wheat to my threshing floor and beat small bundles, swept the wheat and chaff with my hands, rubbed the grains that hadn’t released, and then by hand sorted out the biggest chaff pieces. I then put the grain in a large stainless bowl and winnowed it in the wind. So with very few tools I got one pound of cleaned wheat in about half an hour.
It took another ten minutes to grind the wheat in my electric flour mill and another fifteen minutes to get the dough ready for it’s first rising. I added one cup of store flour to the five cups of whole wheat flour and the results were two nice loaves of bread.
I have been looking at pictures of threshing floors and they are designed as round pads with a low curb. They are designed for a beast of burden to pull a wooden sedge around in circles. Wheat was for thousands of years emmer, spelt and einkorn, hulled wheat that didn’t easily release the grain. Modern wheat doesn’t require the hulls to be rubbed off like emmer requires, or requires very little rubbing. A threshing floor designed for modern wheat would be different but nobody threshes by hand anymore.
You know you are into some archaic projects when you tube doesn’t have tutorials.
I see Africa still does some hand threshing but I can’t find anything about how to thresh wheat by hand or what kinds of yields to expect. My small 2000 sq foot wheat patch that had zero fossil fuel use, and used zero fossil fuel to harvest or process could produce enough flour to make a loaf of bread every day of the year.
Three or four hundred pounds of acorns could be dried and stored for emergencies and processed as needed.
The half acre of corn I have planted is going to produce hundreds of pounds of dried corn. Processing corn is even easier than wheat so between the wheat, corn, and foraged acorns I see no problem with one man, zero fossil fuels, and a one acre garden feeding a small family. Feeding farm animals is another challenge as scale needs expanding to get animals through winter season.There are embodied energy costs in the electric tiller and electric flour mill. I have hand pecked stones bowls, mortars as well as manos and metates but processing flour without electrics is very, very time consuming whether it is , wheat, acorns or corn flour being processed.
Most farmers 150 years ago hauled their grains to a water powered grist mill and they also had communal stills for whiskey. If several small farmers combined resources for milling and alcohol, infrastructure costs and embodied energy costs of infrastructure could be reduced further.